My birthday was June 16th & I was happy to get a few birthday messages from mailing lists & websites I subscribe to. Nevermind how Live Journal reminded me that my birthday was coming and that I could buy myself a gift. Seriously? Seriously.

I did receive birthday wishes from the following sites (of which I am very thankful):

• Kate Nash (shown above)
• Zen Cart
• ING direct
• Skateboard City Forum

Kate Nash got the jump and was actually sent on the 15th, but it was technically already the 16th in the UK.

Mcgillins sends their coupon out at the beginning of the month & gives you a half off lunch coupon.

Thanks to all these Companies/Businesses/Websites for doing it right and sending along a little Birthday greeting to your members. If you collect the data, do something meaningful with it. I know I appreciate it.

The IT Crowd Season 4 is coming out on Channel 4 Friday, June 25th & you can watch the first Episode on their site if you are in the UK or you “will have to find a UK proxy to watch through, and you’ll have to register an account”.

Series 4 | The IT Crowd | Jen the Fredo
Jen wants to stretch herself in the workplace so applies for the post of Entertainment Manager. But when she finds out that amusing her boss Douglas’ business connections has its darker side, she has to turn to Moss and Roy for help.

via Boing Boing

If you are unfamiliar with The IT Crowd, I highly recommend checking out some clips on YouTube. If you think you might be into it, try catching up on past episodes, whatever medium you enjoy watching shows. I’ve been a big fan since Season 1.

The IT Basement 360° Panorama is also pretty cool!

Unfortunately the morning of Happy Cog’aoke 2, I had an unfortunate mishap resulting in a broken collarbone. I was (ironically?) heading to the Convention Center to start my day off attending a panel on failure hosted by Happy Cog & friends. I was borrowing a friend’s Gary Fisher 3 speed cruiser while I was in town instead of shipping my own bike to Austin like I did the previous year. As I was embarking on a slight uphill, I attempted to build some momentum and stood up to pedal a little bit. I was already riding at a decent speed so when the gears in the internal hub skipped, I lost control and wiped out pretty hard on the pavement. I jumped up to avoid any oncoming traffic (thankfully there wasn’t any), took off my backpack, and moved the bike and my things to the sidewalk. After shaking it off and catching my breath I quickly realized that I couldn’t lift my arm. Putting my backpack back on wasn’t going to happen. It was then I realized that I had broken my collarbone. It was very tender and was crunching upon the slightest movements. I knew at that point my adventures in Austin were going to be drastically different than I had planned.

I was approximately 4 blocks from a hospital so I gathered my things as best I could and walked from the scene of the accident the ER. This was no easy task. After spending the better part of the afternoon in the Brackenridge Emergency Room, I rested up since nothing was going to stop me from performing for a second year in a row at Cog’aoke. Not even a freshly broken clavicle was going to keep me from the stage. I had to scrap a few gimmicks I was going to incorporate into my set since I was now performing with only 1 hand. I had to ask The Keyboard Man to assist me in tossing out my swag (haveboard.com stickers and an assortment of beads) at the beginning of my set. I had to come with a straight up energetic performance and rock the mic (and sling) with confidence and pride.

I recruited to Alex Hillman to record my performance with my Flip Mino HD. Due to technical difficulties with the camera, Alex did what any resourceful nerd (I think he prefers ‘geek‘) would do in a time of technical crisis and whipped out his iPhone to record as much as he could of my time on stage. Below is the footage he was able to get on his iPhone. It wasn’t the whole performance but it will have to do for those of you that couldn’t make it.

That performance earned me 3rd place in this year’s competition! I had such a great time regardless of my injury. I won a Limited Edition Gowalla iPod Nano as well as a copy of Rock Band 2 (which I still need to pick up from the folks at Happy Cog).

I would like to thank Alex Harris of AlexDesign.com for the photo’s used in this post. He was right up front and took amazing photos of all the performers and had them posted the very next day.

Thanks again for all your votes, cheers, and support as well as everyone at Happy Cog and all the Cog’aoke Sponsors for helping throw another great SXSWi Party! I’m already looking forward to next year.

A little critique on the piece, “Not only did he form the first swarm of 50 plus users…” is a little misleading. He may have attempted to throw a “Swarm” party at PYT, but it was hardly the first “Swarm” on Foursquare. Maybe it was the first “Swarm” in Philly. I really hope it wasn’t. The preemptive attempt at getting a “Swarm” badge by throwing an event seems a bit contrived. I personally feel that badges should be earned more organically. Promoting a “Swarm” party had some Foursquare user’s cheating (checking in even though they weren’t there) just to get the “Swarm Badge”. Lame, although it should be expected when the goal of your event is simply to earn this badge.

People trying too hard or cheating on Foursquare is starting to make the service less appealing to me. I understand people will use a service however they see fit and I’m hardly trying to tell people how they should and shouldn’t use foursquare. I just feel that the competitive nature of Foursquare combined with the ability to cheat the system brings out some very childish habits in some users. You could probably say the same about me complaining about it. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, I guess

I’ve recently started using Gowalla as well as Foursquare. I won’t go into detail on Gowalla’s service in this post too much. All I’ll say is it feel more like a scavenger hunt and way less competitive. It also uses your GPS to determine how close you are to a venue when trying to check in (I’ve seen this work against people when GPS accuracy isn’t spot on). I feel this makes Gowalla more fun, although I won’t front on Foursquare venue specials, like a free draft beer whenever you check-in to PYT.

I also must say, the term “Droiders” they use at the end of the piece made my skin crawl. Leave it to mainstream media to casually classify different smart-phone users by a brand. As a G1 owner, I really hope the term “Droiders” doesn’t catch on.

Please head over to my contestant page and place your vote every day for the next four days.

Thanks to @technotheory for the photo above of my performance last year where I sang The Humpty Dance and came in fourth place.

On December 8, 2009 ucpgg.org was relaunched with a new website in collaboration with the Wildfire Agency, Damien DeChurch, and myself.The old site needed a lot of work as you can see above. A CMS was built using Wordpress for this project with a lot of heavy customization and the help of various plugins.

They also required a user forum, which I utilized Vanilla Forums and built a custom theme for that as well, to match the look of the site.

I particularly liked the Wordpress Custom Admin Branding Plugin. Clients can tend to think that Wordpress is just a blogging platform so it helps to apply the Client’s logo to the Admin section of Wordpress and this plugin does just that, with a few edits to their template files.

Last week Meljoy.com launched and I’m quite happy with the outcome. It was my first venture into using wordpress for a client’s portfolio site. The thumbnails on the right hand site are her Work, and the left shows the blog as well as the detail view of the Work section.

This site is hosted on godaddy on a windows server. It is also an aliased domain. This became a major hurdle when I moved the site from the development environment to the the production server. I had to disable clean URLs in wordpress, and because it is an aliased domain, the site pages, although at root level have to show the name of the aliased directory along with the domain name like this: http://meljoy.com/meljoy/?p=590. I wasn’t particularly happy with this for many reasons, including SEO. I believe you can get clean URLs working on a godaddy windows server, but it no simple task, and I regretfully could not spend any more time on it. My experience is more on the Linux Server side of things, so it is always an interesting task when a client has a windows server. Maybe next time I’ll dive in and get that working, godaddy.

Have a look and check out all the amazing stuff that Melanie does. Feedback Is definitely welcome.

I just wrote a post over at the Giraffe on what core Wordpress files to edit if you would like underscores instead of dashes in your Wordpress URIs. It is unfortunate that you cannot add a filter to a wordpress them to avoid having to update the core files every time you upgrade Wordpress.